Стивен Кинг - Cell

"Tommy and Frito and that guy who was always pickin his nose, they took off," the redheaded shrimp was saying. He expanded what chest he had. "But I stuck around, Gunnah! Holy fuck, buddy, you're bleedin like a pig."

Alice put hydrogen peroxide on the gauze pad, then took a step toward Gunner. He immediately took a step back. "Get away from me. You're poison."

"It's them!" the redhead cried. "From the dreams! What'd I tellya?"

"Keep away from me," Gunner said. "Fuckin bitch. Alla ya."

Clay felt a sudden urge to shoot him and wasn't surprised. Gunner looked and acted like a dangerous dog backed into a corner, teeth bared and ready to bite, and wasn't that what you did to dangerous dogs when there was no other recourse? Didn't you shoot them? But of course they did have recourse, and if Alice could play Good Samaritan to the scumbag who had called her a teenybop bitch, he guessed he could refrain from executing him. But there was something he wanted to find out before he let these two charming fellows go their way.

"These dreams," he said. "Do you have a . . . I don't know . . . a kind of spirit guide in them? A guy in a red hoodie, let's say?"

Gunner shrugged. Tore a piece off his shirt and used it to mop the blood on his face. He was coming back a little now, seemed a little more aware of what had happened. "Harvard, yeah. Right, Harold?"

The little redhead nodded. "Yeah. Harvard. The black guy. But they ain't dreams. If you don't know, it ain't no fuckin good telling ya. They're fuckin broadcasts. Broadcasts in our sleep. If you don't get em, it's because you're poison. Ain't they, Gunnah?"

"You guys fucked up bigtime," Gunner said in a brooding voice, and mopped his forehead. "Don't you touch me."

"We're gonna have our own place," Harold said. "Ain't we, Gunnah? Up Maine, fuckin right. Everyone who didn't get Pulsed is goin there, and we're gonna be left alone. Hunt, fish, live off the fuckin land. Harvard says so."

"And you believe him?" Alice said. She sounded fascinated.

Gunner raised a finger that shook slightly. "Shut your mouth, bitch."

"I think you better shut yours," Jordan said. "We've got the guns."

"You better not even think about shootin us!" Harold said shrilly. "Whatcha think Harvard would do to you if you shot us, you fuckin punkass shorty?"

"Nothing," Clay said.

"You don't—" Gunner began, but before he could get any further, Clay took a step forward and pistol-whipped him across the jaw with Beth Nickerson's .45. The sight at the end of the barrel opened a fresh cut along Gunner's jaw, but Clay hoped that in the end this might prove better medicine than the hydrogen peroxide the man had refused. In this he proved wrong.

Gunner fell back against the side of the abandoned milk tanker, looking at Clay with shocked eyes. Harold took an impulsive step forward. Tom trained Sir Speedy on him and gave his head a single forbidding shake. Harold shrank back and began to gnaw the ends of his dirty fingers. Above them his eyes were huge and wet.

"We're going now," Clay said. "I'd advise you stay here at least an hour, because you really don't want to see us again. We're leaving you your lives as a gift. If we see you again, we'll take them away." He backed toward Tom and the others, still staring into that glowering, unbelieving bloody face. He felt a little like the old-time lion-tamer Frank Buck, trying to do it all by pure force of will. "One more thing. I don't know why the phone-people want all the 'normies' in Kashwak, but I know what a roundup usually means for the cattle. You might think about that the next time you're getting one of your nightly podcasts."

"Fuck you," Gunner said, but broke his eyelock with Clay and gazed down at his shoes.

"Come on, Clay," Tom said. "Let's go."

"Don't let us see you again, Gunner," Clay said, but they did.

Gunner and harold must have gotten ahead of them somehow, maybe by taking a chance and traveling five or ten daylight miles while Clay, Tom, Alice, and Jordan were sleeping in the State Line Motel, which was about two hundred yards into Maine. The pair might have laid up in the Salmon Falls rest area, Gunner hiding his new ride among the half a dozen or so cars that had been abandoned there. It didn't really matter. What mattered was they got ahead of them, waited for them to go by, and then pounced.

Clay barely registered the approaching sound of the engine or Jordan's comment—"Here comes a sprinter." This was his home turf, and as they passed each familiar landmark—the Freneau Lobster Pound two miles east of the State Line Motel, Shaky's Tastee Freeze across from it, the statue of General Joshua Chamberlain in the tiny Turnbull town square—he felt more and more like a man having a vivid dream. He didn't realize how little he'd expected to ever reach home again until he saw the big plastic sof-serv cone towering over Shaky's—it looked both prosaic and as exotic as something from a lunatic's nightmare, hulking its curled tip against the stars.

"Road's pretty littered for a sprinter," Alice commented.

They walked to the side of the road as headlights brightened on the hill behind them. An overturned pickup truck was lying on the white line. Clay thought there was a good chance the oncoming vehicle would ram it, but the headlights swerved to the left only an instant after they cleared the hilltop; the sprinter avoided the pickup easily, running on the shoulder for a few seconds before regaining the road. Clay surmised later that Gunner and Harold must have gone over this stretch, mapping the sprinter-reefs carefully.

They stood watching, Clay closest to the approaching lights, Alice standing next to him on his left. On her left were Tom and Jordan. Tom had his arm slung casually around Jordan's shoulders.

"Boy, he's really comin," Jordan said. There was no alarm in his voice; it was just a remark. Clay felt no alarm, either. He had no premonition of what was going to happen. He had forgotten all about Gunner and Harold.

There was a sports car of some sort, maybe an MG, parked half on and half off the road fifty feet or so west of where they were standing. Harold, who was driving the sprinter vehicle, swerved to avoid it. Just a minor swerve, but perhaps it threw Gunner's aim off. Or perhaps not. Perhaps Clay had never been his target. Perhaps it was Alice he'd meant to hit all along.

Tonight they were in a nondescript Chevrolet sedan. Gunner was kneeling on the backseat, out the window to his waist, holding a ragged chunk of cinderblock in his hands. He gave an inarticulate cry that could have come directly from a balloon in one of the comic books Clay had drawn as a freelance— "Yahhhhbh!" —and threw the block. It flew a short and lethal course through the dark and struck Alice in the side of the head. Clay never forgot the sound it made. The flashlight she had been holding—which would have made her a perfect target, although they had all been holding them—tumbled from her relaxing hand and sprayed a cone of light across the macadam, picking out pebbles and a piece of tail-light glass that glinted like a fake ruby.

Clay fell on his knees beside her, calling her name, but he couldn't hear himself in the sudden roar of Sir Speedy, which was finally getting a trial. Muzzle-flashes strobed the dark, and by their glare he could see blood pouring down the left side of her face—oh God, what face—in a torrent.

Then the gunfire stopped. Tom was screaming "The barrel pulled up, I couldn't hold it down, I think I shot the whole fucking clip into the sky" and Jordan was screaming "Is she hurt, did he get her" and Clay thought of how she had offered to put hydrogen peroxide on Gunner's forehead and then bandage it. Better a little sting than an infection, am I right? she had said, and he had to stop the bleeding. He had to stop it right now. He stripped off the jacket he was wearing, then the sweater beneath. He would use the sweater, wrap it around her head like a fucking turban.